Argument
Appeal to nature
Overview
An appeal to nature is a rhetorical technique for presenting and proposing the argument that "a thing is good because it is 'natural', or bad because it is 'unnatural' or 'synthetic'." In debate and discussion, an appeal-to-nature argument can be considered to be a bad argument, because the implicit primary premise "What is natural is good" has no factual meaning beyond rhetoric in some or most contexts.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Since we have undertaken to make a diligent search into Nature, I cannot but conclude it necessary to declare what Nature is. It is very absurd to attempt a discourse of the essence of natural things, and not to understand what is the power and sphere of Nature. If Aristotle be credited, Nature is the principle of motion and rest, in that thing in which it exists as a principle and not by accident.
Plutarch, Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3
States what Appeal to nature is.
An appeal is sometimes made to the sense (feeling) of right and morality, as well as of religion, which man is alleged to possess,—to his benevolent dispositions,—and even to his heart generally,—i.e. to the subject so far as the various practical feelings are in it all combined. So far as this appeal implies (1) that these ideas are immanent in his own self, and (2) that when feeling is opposed to the logical…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Close in meaning to Appeal to nature; the term itself is not named.
The phrase seems to point to a vague notion that there is some such thing as natural good; to a belief that Nature may be said to fix and decide what shall be good, just as she fixes and decides what shall exist. For instance, it may be supposed that ‘health’ is susceptible of a natural definition, that Nature has fixed what health shall be: and health, it may be said, is obviously good; hence in this case Nature…
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
Close in meaning to Appeal to nature; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Genetic engineering
- Argument
- Emile, or On Education
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Julian Baggini
- Nature
- Peter Singer
- Normativity
- Naturalism (philosophy)
- Begging the question
- Human nature
- Good and evil
- Rodney Brooks
- Ancient Greece
- Nikolas Kompridis
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophical pessimism.